…or what happens when your systems break down?

So what do you need to live a happy and fulfilled life? Self awareness, vision, a plan, being in action, knowing what you want to do and doing it. That sort of thing.

Along with all that you need systems in place to enable you to be out there doing whatever it is that makes you happy and fulfilled.

All very good so far. And if you have any or all of the above going on right now then you are in a great place. However, have you considered what would happen if there were to be a breakdown in the system?

There are many things that can cause a breakdown in our daily systems and they don’t have to be major events to have a big impact. They could include: car breaking down, being ill, your children or another relative being ill, alarm doesn’t go off in the morning, computer crashes, unexpected client meeting, trains delayed, and so on and so on. And they can occur in all areas of life – health & fitness, career, family, hobbies, money, physical environment to name but a few.

Let me give you a real example, my husband and I have childcare arrangements that allow us to follow our chosen career paths. Most of the time these work smoothly and everyone can easily go about their activities as planned. Today we experienced a breakdown – no childcare for our youngest during the day, various ferrying of children between after-school clubs to be done and us both with work commitments.

Before I explore further what happened in this particular instance let’s take a step back and consider three ways of working with breakdowns. The first two consider the pre-event situation and the third one deals with the moment of impact. The first two are great and can be used when creating a new system or conducting an audit of an existing one.

1. Prevent – think about what has caused a breakdown in the past, think about what you know are likely to be causes of breakdown. What steps can you take to prevent these happening?

2. Anticipate – some things you will not be able to prevent but they are also not entirely unexpected. Are there recurring events that cause a breakdown in your system? Do you know there are events outside of your control that could have an impact? What can you put in place now to minimise their impact? What contingencies can you set up?

The third is the one that has the greatest impact and so is the focus of the remainder of this article.

3. React – the unexpected has happened, it wasn’t prevented and there are no contingency plans in place. Two things happen: a practical reaction and an emotional reaction.

The emotional reaction kicks in as expectations are thrown off course and this causes an upset. And it isn’t necessarily directly about the situation. Upsets about other areas can be triggered by our own and others’ emotional responses to an event or situation. The practical reaction is problem solving, finding out what can be done to get things back on track.

So back to this morning and managing our day. From a practical perspective we were able to use the support network we have created to help in these situations to come up with a good, though not perfect, solution. All very good, breakdown largely dealt with.

However, the solution was not perfect in that it did not entirely replicate the usual system. This caused the emotional reaction to kick-in. When you are dealing with changing expectations or commitments there is a whole lot more going on than practicalities. Personal values such as integrity, reliability, service, self-worth, responsibility, relationships can all get put under pressure. When the honouring of our fundamental values are threatened it can be hard to step back and see the big picture.

So, what happens when the unexpected happens and what can you do about it?

1. Don’t spend time analysing the whys, hows and wherefores of why it happened. It’s happened, now deal with it.

2. Take a practical response – what needs to be done and what can you do. Include your support networks, other resources, what can you delegate, be creative in your thinking.

3. Don’t ignore the emotional response – it may be that you need to deal with this before turning to practical solutions. Think about what’s going on – what is the upset really about, which of your values are being threatened.

4. Learn – what can you learn for the future. What would you do differently? What can you put in place?

5. Don’t be attached to the new system looking exactly the same as the old one. It might or it might not. It may go back to the old one or the new one may be a permanent replacement – at least, until the next time it needs to reshape.

Most importantly, all parts of the system need to be flexible – and that means not only the practical elements but the personal ones too – i.e. you.